Comment by gregw2

Oh, I 100% agree. The question is how much you can reduce the effort of the port/migration, and in particular the validation effort.

I've worked on projects where the core bits of code were "90%" converted by some automated tool, and in my view the overall benefit to the project timeline was probably only 20-30% because of the Amdahl's-law-type overheads of validation and bits of code not supported by the automation/conversion process. Nice, but no silver bullet.

Non-idiomatic porting also isn't super-helpful if the resulting code isn't maintainable.